Entertainment

Was that chervil Remy was about to toss into the soup?

Pixar

Remy (voiced by Patton Oswalt) longs to become a chef.

While a theater full of young kids giggled along with the slapstick high jinks of Ratatouille's animated rodent hero at a recent screening, I sat agog at the film's painstaking re-creations of culinary minutiae.

It wasn't just parsley in Remy's paws. It was, indeed, chervil, the less common herb with smaller leaves whose delicate flavor is ideal for exactly the sort of creamy potage Remy was scurrying to concoct. And he wasn't merely readying to hurl the sprig into the pot. He had crushed it, a technique used to release the herb's aromatic oils and more quickly absorb its flavor into the soup.

Boy, that's specific. But it illustrates the kinds of pains through which Pixar went to accurately mimic Ratatouille's world of French restaurants. And as someone who has spent most of his professional life either working in restaurants or reviewing them, I was mighty impressed.

I'd heard heady buzz about the film but didn't quite expect such a delicious barrage of true-to-life details: Remy's precise rendering of a golden (not, heaven forbid, browned) omelet; the realistic flick of a cook's wrist as he sautés vegetables in a copper pan; even the faithful way in which the ingredients in the restaurant's walk-in cooler are organized. The filmmakers spent considerable time taking cooking classes and eating in the finest restaurants in Paris for research, but happily all the nitty-gritty doesn't come off as too precious. It manages to both illuminate Remy's passion for fine dining while tickling the ribs of food lovers with a steady stream of wink-wink in-jokes.

I did roll my eyes during the obligatory reference to Château Cheval Blanc, the prized wine hoarded by Paul Giamatti's character in Sideways.

Then there's the business of the villainous, all-powerful food critic, Anton Ego. Aw, we're not that misanthropic in the real world. It's true, restaurants and critics haven't always maintained the easiest of relationships. But I don't know any critic, in France or America, who lives in the brooding opulence in which Ego resides, and most of us have fairly droll senses of humor. (Eating out night after night entails being a social director; you have to like people.)

If I could, on behalf of all restaurant critics everywhere, change one detail in Ratatouille, it would be when Anton Ego darkens the doorway of Gusteau's, Remy's adopted restaurant, and forebodingly announces that he will be dining there the next evening. Good food critics never proclaim their imminent arrival. My Best Friend's Wedding famously got that one wrong, too.

Otherwise, foodies, go marinate in the movie's saucily unerring depiction of restaurant life. And if you're as ravenous for French food as I was afterward, try Lavendou in North Dallas for dinner.